The Soviet Union has many secrets, and one of the best kept is that of the Maly Ballet of Leningrad. Maly means "small" in Russian, but this is hardly an accurate description of a hundred-member company that performs four times weekly during its regular August to May season and that has toured Eastern and Western Europe as well as the Far East.
Unlike the Kirov Ballet, however, it has yet to tour North America, remaining somewhat in the shadow of the larger company. The Kirov has slightly over two hundred dancers and a theater seating twenty-five hundred, nearly twice the size of the Maly theater.
The Kirov company traces its origins to 1738, whereas the resident opera and ballet companies of the Maly Theater date from the early twentieth century - the opera being founded in 1915 and the ballet in 1933. The building housing them was previously named the Mikhailovsky Theater, and specialized in presenting plays in French for the elite of St. Petersburg. Fyodor Lopukov (1889-1973) was the first artistic director of the Maly Ballet, and his spirit is still omnipresent. Lopukov was an adventurous choreographer praised for the musical sensitivity of his ballets and an early influence on George Balanchine, whom he cast with other young dancers in his controversial Dance Symphony, presented at the Kirov in 1923.
Experimental Productions
Lopukov started the Maly with a core of thirty dancers, and its first production was a revival of Marius Petipa's Harlequinade which, in revised form, remains in its repertory to the present. The original Petipa also served Balanchine as a model for his own production of the work for New York City Ballet. While the Maly subsequently revived other Petipa ballets, it quickly gained a reputation for doing experimental productions and became the jumping-off point for a host of choreographers. Among them were Leonid Lavrovsky (1905-1967), who subsequently became the artistic director the Kirov; Oletg Vinogradov, that company's present director; and Yurin Grigorovitch, the current artistic director of the Bolshoi.
Other choreographers associated with the Maly were Leonid Jacobson (1904-1974), who founded his own Jacobson Ballet company, still resident in Leningrad. Jacobson won fame but also provoked official criticism for his choreographic miniatures. One of these, Vestris, was created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, who performed it during his first years in the United States. Nikita Dolgushin, who danced and choreographed at the Maly, is now director of the Choreographic Institute of the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory and has initiated the first teaching exchange program with the dance department of an American university, Towson State in Maryland. A graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory program, Nicolai Boyarchikov is presently director of Maly Ballet.
The company, with its sister organization the Maly Opera, has the reputation of being the nation's "laboratory for opera and ballet." Among the opera company's notable firsts were its premier performances of Prokofiev's War and Peace and Shostakovich's Katerina Izmaylova. Discussing the tradition of his company, Boyarchikov commented, "We don't want to have just one type of ballet; there is room for romantic, classic, dramatic, and abstract ballet." During the course of performances in one week the company demonstrated the artistic mix
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